A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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The Right Response

The decision by the United States to launch air strikes against targets in Afghanistan is the right response to the terrorist attacks that killed so many innocent civilians on September 11. It is no small matter to take the American republic into war, but a failure to respond to such an outrage would have led Osama bin Laden and his followers to assume that they could kill more innocents with impunity. A crucial responsibility of the federal government under the Constitution is to defend the American people from foreign enemies.

President Bush has indicated that the air strikes are merely the first stage of the U.S. response. It is imperative that this be so. Cruise missile launches and bombing raids alone will not root out Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network or destabilize Afghanistan’s extremist Taliban regime. Only a follow up campaign using ground forces can hope to accomplish those goals.

The Bush administration wisely seems to be resisting the pressure exerted by other members of the international coalition not to go after the Taliban government. It should be a goal of U.S. policy to bring down that regime. The Taliban has given Bin Laden sanctuary for years, and the two factions have maintained an odious symbiotic relationship. At the very least, the Taliban was a passive accomplice in the September 11 attacks and, therefore, deserves to meet the same fate as Al-Qaeda.

Administration leaders have also struck the correct balance on the issue of a subsequent wider war. They have reserved the right to take action against other movements and regimes if there is evidence of their culpability in the terrorist atrocities against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At the same time, the administration has not adopted the advice of some hawkish pundits to attack an assortment of countries merely because they have been hostile to the United States. Such a wider war is, at the very least, premature. It would risk transforming the conflict into a holy war between the U.S.-led West and the Islamic world, and that is a risk we should not incur lightly.

Thus far, the administration has handled an extremely difficult challenge well. The war effort in Afghanistan deserves the full support of the American people.